Disruptive behaviour in school

For a trainee teacher, this is one topic that tends to worry them far more than any other. What if they start shouting, or won't listen to me? What if there is one student who keeps ruining the lessons? This section will look at some of the factors which might cause a child to begin disrupting a lesson. Also it will ask "what can the teacher do about it if they do?"

Fontana (1995) defines disruptive behaviour as "behaviour that proves unacceptable to the teacher". This illustrates the fact that behaviours that are considered disruptive may vary hugely from culture to culture, over time, or even from classroom to classroom within the same school. Your active psychologist's mind will naturally have already realised that such a subjective definition will raise real problems surrounding the quantifiability and validity of any attempt to identify disruptive behaviour.

Types of disruptive behaviour

Conduct

Conduct disruptive behaviours are ones that involve students acting against the usual norms or rules of society (or the classroom). Examples might include:

Distracting others

Attention-seeking

Calling out in class

Being out of their seat

Later on we will focus on one specific conduct disorder: attention-seeking behaviour.

Bullying

Bullying is a specific type of conduct disorder. It is defined as:

"an unwanted, aggressive behavior among school aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance."

Bullying may be verbal or physical. Increasingly, bullying involve technology, such as cyberbullying. Bullies are more likely to have been bullied or mistreated themselves, and often have trouble forming normal mature relationships with people.

﻿﻿Immaturity﻿﻿

﻿Immaturity refers to a child having not reached the correct level of maturation to be able to display the behaviours required by the class. For example, the child could lack the attention span to concentrate on the teacher for long periods, or the capability to understand instructions given.﻿

Alternatively, the student may be academically capable, but more easily bored with the class, or less able to control themselves if they become frustrated.

All of these could lead to disruptive behaviour.

Assignment 1

Read the section above once more, then answer the below questions from memory and under timed conditions. You should not spend more than 8 minutes on the response, but with both answers together you should have written nearly half a page.

1 (a) Explain, in your own words, what is meant by ‘disruptive behaviour’. [2]

(b) Describe two types of disruptive behaviour. [4]

ADHD

ADHD is a disorder that can often result in disruptive behaviour (this is not unusual - autism and dyslexia can lead to disruption too). See the ADHD section on the SEN page for more info.

General causes of disruptive behaviour

Although different types of disruptive behaviours may have some of their own specific causes, there are also some general conditions that make disruptive behaviour more likely to occur. These can includepoor parentingand poor teaching.

Poor parenting

Most children are lucky enough to be brought up feeling valued and loved by our parents, but sadly this is not always the case.

If a child feels starved of attention and care from its parents, this can lead to some very negative consequences.

For example, the child may not have been able to learn the usual rules about which behaviours are socially acceptable and which are not, leading to disruptive behaviours.

Another possibility is that the child may also begin to seek the attention that they desire in other areas, such as in the classroom. In order to attract attention, they may display disruptive behaviours.

See below for a more detailed explanation of attention-seeking behaviour, using the behaviourist idea of operant conditioning.

Poor teaching

One of the first things that a teacher has to think if a student is disrupting the class is "is it me?" Even the most disruptive students will sit for hours on computer games or other hobbies that they enjoy, so maybe it's just that the lessons aren't interesting enough!

Another possibility is that the teacher is creating the problem by classing behaviour as disruptive when it isn't. A student being told off for asking the person next to them to borrow a ruler may quickly become bad tempered and disruptive.

Kounin (1990) identified five key characteristics of effective 'classroom management' (teaching that will not lead to disruptive behaviour). They are:

'Withitness' - this doesn't mean whether they listen to the latest music... it means whether they are aware of everything going on in the lesson.

Overlapping - the ability to do a number of tasks at once

Smoothness and momentum - keeping the lesson flowing and cutting down on 'dead time' when the students are unoccupied

Group alerting - keeping students alert with occasional random questions

Stimulating 'seatwork' - variety is important in many areas of education, and it is no different here. doing the same thing repeatedly leads to bored students who are more likely to be disruptive.

Effects of disruptive behaviour

It is easy to imagine the effects of disruptive behaviour on the lesson itself, but there are also wider effects; on other students and the disruptive child themselves.Garner and Hill (1995) list some of the possible effects as:

Prevents children’s participation in educational activities

Isolates them from their peers

Affects other pupils' learning

Reduces opportunities for involvement in ordinary community activities

Excessive demands upon teachers, staff and resources

Places the child or others in physical danger

Makes future placement difficult

Social isolation is one effect of disruptive behaviour which is not always obvious.

Assignment 2

Write this from memory:

Explain two possible effects of disruptive behaviour (4)

Bullet point 2 - Causes and effects of one disruptive behaviour

• causes and effects of one disruptive behaviour Any disruptive behaviour (e.g. one from above) but not attention deficit hyperactive disorder

Possible causes and effects of one disruptive behaviour: attention-seeking

The effects of attention-seeking behaviour are the same as for most other disruptive behaviours, which are given in green above. Two examples of explanations for this type of behaviour are given below.

A behaviourist explanation

A behaviourist might explain attention seeking behaviour in the classroom through operant conditioning. Attention from parents is a reinforcement, often used as a reward for good behaviour. However, if parents are not providing enough attention to a child (see the 'poor parenting' section above), then they may begin to seek attention in other areas, such as the classroom.

In a normal classroom, teachers will often give more attention to misbehaviour than to appropriate behaviour, so disruptive behaviour is a better strategy for attracting attention than doing good work.

Attention-seeking behaviour will often attract negative responses from the teacher, but the reinforcement provided by being the centre of attention will be more powerful than any punishment given by the teacher, so the attention-seeking behaviour is reinforced.

The reinforcement works in a cycle...

A biological explanation

One genetic theory of attention seeking and disruptive behaviour is that specific genes may be responsible for shaping the behaviour. Modern techniques with DNA have allowed specific genes to be isolated for certain behaviours and conditions. However, with psychological disorders these aren't usually so clear cut. That said, there is some evidence linking attention-seeking in school with other self-control and addictive problems.

For example, certain genes which may predispose the individual to antisocial and attention seeking behaviour, may also contribute to an increase in vulnerability to addiction. Often these traits are linked to the personality characteristic of impulsivity, which has been found to have strong genetic links. Attention seeking behaviour has been linked with alcoholism (Jang et al 2008) and with gambling (Comings et al 1996). These links support an underlying biological factor in the behaviour.

You are the teacher - evaluating causes of disruptive behaviour

By this stage, you should be getting pretty good at evaluating and even better at thinking like a psychologist - drawing links between different areas of the specification.

For example, looking at the two columns above, you should already have all of the usual criticisms of behaviourism in your mind from previous parts of the Education section. Genetic explanations you will have done in the Abnormality section. Can you remember the positives and negatives of them? The same ones will apply here too!

Make a list of positive and negative evaluation points for both of the causes given above and bring them to the next lesson for discussion

When dealing with disruptive behaviour, there are two main types of approach.

Corrective strategies are employed after the behaviour has occured, with the aim of preventing it happening again.

Preventive strategies are used to try to stop disruptive behaviour occurring in the first place.

There are a few different types of each of these that you should know, but before you move on to them, see if you can think of some examples of each of these strategies yourself, based on your knowledge of schools.

Preventive strategies

What things could you do to try to ensure that disruptive behaviour doesn't occur in a school?

There are probably two classes of preventive strategies; classroom level ones and whole school level ones.

Watch the video on the right of a teacher starting a new school year with a difficult class. What strategies is he using to try to ensure that disruptive behaviour is prevented? You may see some overlap with other units we have done as well.

List as many points as you can. What you will hopefully see is that in class preventive strategies are the same things that Kounin (1990) identified, listed above. Are those five strategies on display here?

Whole school preventive strategies

Handwashing is a preventive strategy for disease...

Cotton (1990) conducted a meta-analysis (looked at the results of numerous individual studies together), and found that most schools with successful preventive strategies shared the following features:

Commitment - the staff must believe in the system, and in the importance of encouraging good behaviour.

High expectations - staff make it clear that they expect good behaviour from students

Clear rules - staff and students must both understand what is and is not acceptable, and the consequences of good and bad behaviour. Students can be involved with the design of this system

Warm school climate - staff take an interest in students as individuals, offering broader support for their well-being.

Visible, supportive headteacher - often seen in hallways and classrooms, one who knows the students in the school.

Teachers in control of discipline - teachers feel free to deal with their own problems themselves, although more senior members of staff may still be involved for serious offences.

Close ties with local communities - parents have close involvement with the school and are knowledgable about what is going on.

Assignment 3 - section C sample question on preventive strategies

3. A new headmaster at a school tells his members of staff that be believes in improving behaviour through prevention, not correction

(a) Describe preventive strategies in controlling disruptive behaviour. [6](b) Design a program to successfully implement these strategies into the school [8]

Two examples of corrective strategies

Behaviour Modification (Presland, 1990)

Behaviour modification was mentioned all the way back in the 'Approaches' section. It is a behaviourist application to learning (so that means that you can use it for an essay on the behaviourist approach as well as one on disruptive behaviour. The aim is to replace disruptive behaviour with more appropriate behaviour, by following a series of steps:

Defining the problem - deciding exactly which behaviours need to be changed

Measuring the problem - e.g. counting the number of occurrences in a lesson.

Determining antecedents and consequences - e.g. find out what triggers or reinforces the behaviour.

Deciding whether and how to change antecedents - do you really need to do all this, or would a simple change of the situation, e.g. moving them to a new seat, actually solve the problem.

Planning and implementing the intervention - deciding what, and how, to selectively reinforce the behaviour in order to change it. The reinforcement can also use other behaviourist ideas such as token economies etc.

Following up - evaluating with the student whether the program has been successful or not.

It has experimental support. Cotton (1990) reported that many studies had found that reinforcements applied selectively were effective at improving disruptive behaviour

As previously mentioned, reinforcements are a simple, cheap and easy to understand for both teacher andstudents.

The teacher is not the only person who can provide reinforcement in a class. Laughter from peers etc may still encourage bad behaviour.

Other students may find it unfair that someone is being praised for doing things that they do regularly, without receiving the same reinforcemnts.

Self-Instructional Training (SIT) (Meichenbaum, 1971)

As you would expect for a cognitive strategy, SIT is less worried with the exact consequences of the behaviour than about how the student thinks about the behaviour. It is the thought about the outcome, rather than the outcome itself, that is the most important thing. SIT was created to aid learning with hyperactive and impulsive behaviours, and consists of five steps:

Cognitive modelling - Teacher models the task/behaviour, talking through the process as they do. (There are clear links to Bandura and social learning theory in this process)

Co-working - The student repeats the task, talking through the process as they do, whilst a teacher guides them. The students should experience success at an academic task, which may not happen very often.

Imitation - The student repeats the task and vocalises, but without teacher guidance.

Sub-vocal performance without lip movement - As before, but without lip movement.

Modelling how to do something, then reinforcing a sequence of successful performance, is a good example of a cognitive behaviour modification.

Meichenbaum (1971) used this sequence with a line-drawing task which became increasingly more demanding and complex. Students became less impulsive and made fewer errors after SIT.

Cognitive-behavioural strategies are widely used and have been found to be successful in many areas of psychology (e.g. abnormality)

This experiment used a task with low ecological validity for most classrooms (line drawing), and an unrepresentative sample (impulsive and hyperactive children). The same results might therefore not be generalisable to other samples or tasks.

Assignment 4 - putting theory into practice

Use your imagination for a second. You are a teacher (yes I know... you'll have to imagine that all those other career plans didn't work out. Don't worry, it's only make believe) and you have a child in your class who is an attention-seeking. What do you do to control and improve his/her behaviour?

Design a behaviour modification and an SIT program to combat attention-seeking behaviour

This will be a good chance to apply the theory above to a real life scenario. Write both programs out and bring them to class ready for demonstration and discussion!

Feel like you've seen all this before? GOOD! You have!

It should be clear that large amounts of this section use the same theories and principles as some other units we've covered. For example:

Large parts of 'Disruptive Behaviour' overlap with ideas from the 'Motivation' section. This is obvious... of course if you are not motivated you are likely to produce disruptive behaviour, and of course strategies that increase motivation also reduce the level of misbehaving! The happy consequence of this is that, AS LONG AS YOU PHRASE IT CORRECTLY, strategies to increase motivation could be used as preventive or corrective strategies. This is good! Again, concentrate on getting your understanding to the point where you can use the same evidence in different areas.

They rely on basic theories covered in the 'Approaches' section. Behaviour modification is mentioned in the spec in the first section. How nice that we only have to learn one thing to cover two bases...

SEN are often associated with disruptive behaviours, so it's not surprising that the treatments for SEN, such as the Alpha-to-Omega program, use the same techniques as behaviour modification for disruptive behaviour.

End of section essay writing exercise - section B

Here, have a go at both parts of a section B question on motivation and education.

2 a) Describe what psychologists have discovered about disruptive behaviour and education. [8]2 b) Evaluate what psychologists have discovered about disruptive behaviourand education and include a discussion of reductionism. [12]

First read this document, which covers the skills that we want you to learn when approaching these questions. In summary, you need to try to mention a range of information in question a), so try to mention things from all three bullet points in the specification

For the question b), try to evaluate using issues and debates (same ones as from AS level). On this page, issues such as reductionism, determinism, ethics, data collection methods, scientific-ness, objectivity and other have been mentioned. Use these in your evaluations! Remember to use a PEE format if you find it helpful.

One final point. Make sure you answer the specific question asked! The 2 b) question will always have a little extra requirement in it, where it will ask you to focus your discussion on one specific area or issue. Here is it 'reductionism', which just means that you have to compare and contrast the view of at least two different theoretical approaches. At least a paragraph should consequently be devoted to this.

Generic mark schemes are given below. Read them carefully before you start writing and make sure your essays fulfill all the requirements. Please submit your essays through the form on the home page.

Section C question

As you should know by now, Section C requires you to answer 1 question from a choice of 2. The questions will ask you to apply what you know to a new scenario or area.It has two parts; one 6 mark recall question and one 8 mark application question.

For example: 4 A child in your class is an attention-seeker. Every time you turn away she is out of her seat and every time you talk to the class she interrupts. It is becoming a problem as it is disruptive to the class.

(a) Suggest a behaviour modification technique that would help to control this attention-seeking behaviour. [8](b) Explain the psychology on which your suggestion is based. [6]

The first question allows you to be creative. There is no single right answer. All you have to do is give practical and specific ideas for how you might implement the theory you have picked into the scenario they give you. About a page should be a good length. Here you have to suggest how behaviour modification could be used to combat attention seeking. If you understand the theories above, you will hopefully have a good idea of how this might be done. It takes some getting used to writing this way, but it is an area that, with a little bit of practice, you will be able to do very well on.

The second question is a straightforward recall question. This is the longest question you will get which could focus on just a single theory. You need to write about half a page, so a simple revision check is to make sure that you can write half a page of description about every idea/theory/study that is specifically mentioned in the specification.

Have a go at the questions above. Please submit your essays through the form on the home page.